 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's day two live coverage of VMware Explorer 2022 from Moscone Center in San Francisco. Lisa Martin here as your host with Dave Nicholson. We've got a couple of guests here and we have some props on set. Get a load of this Nature Fresh Farms produce. Keith Bradley joins us, the VP of IT from Nature Fresh Farms. And Allison Beers is back as well, Director of Marketing and Edge Solutions for Dell. Guys, welcome back to the program and thanks for bringing some food. Thank you so much. So Keith, talk to us a little bit about technology from Nature Fresh Farms perspective. How do we look at this farming organization as a tech company? As technical, we're something that measures everything we grow. So we're 200 acres of greenhouse, spanning probably about 300 or 400 acres of land. Everything's entirely environmentally controlled. So the peppers that we have in front of you that's made of, they're all grown and controlled from everything they get from light to moisture, to irrigation and nutrients. So we do all that. So should I be able to taste the Dell goodness in these cucumbers, for example? I like to say Nature Fresh slash Dell goodness. I mean, connect the dots for us. So let's go through that sort of mental exercise of how are these end products for consumers better because of what you're doing in IT? So one of the things that we've been able to do and one of the transformations we made is we are now able to run our ETLs. So analyze the data real time at the edge. So making decisions which used to be only once a day based on analytics to now multiple times a day. Our ETLs used to take eight to 10 hours to run. So extraction, transformation and load. So we consider it a party foul if you use a TLA. And you don't find it the first time. But you get a pass because you're an actual and real person. I'll give you that one. I already had a claim weight on that. I'm sorry, so continue. So it allowed down the growers to make multiple decisions. And then you start adding the next layer. As we expanded our technology base, we started introducing AI into it. So now AI is even starting to make decisions before the grower even knows to make them based on historical data. So it's allowed us to become more proactive in protecting the health and longevity and even taste of that plant and the product coming out to you. That's awesome. Allison, talk to us about, from Dell's perspective, how is it helping NatureFresh to simplify the edge? Which there's a lot of complexity there. You talked about kind of the size of the organization, but how do you help simplify it? I think NatureFresh had a lot of common problems that we see customers have. So they had some really interesting ambitions to improve their produce and do it in a GMO free way and really bring a quality product to their customer. But yet, they were each solving their problems on their individual farms in different ways. And so one of the ways that we were able to help was to consolidate a lot of those silos as they were expanding the scope and scale of what they really wanted to do from a technology perspective. And then being able to do that in a secure way that's delivering the insights they need when they need them right there at the edge is really critical. So can you give it, so again, drilling down on, I think it's wonderful that we have the actual stuff here because we often talk in these abstract terms about outcomes. There's your outcome right there. But talk about this growing in the soil somewhere. You have growers, it's not an abstraction. These are actual people, right? Where does the technology organism interface occur here? You have organically grown crops. Where's that interface? Where's the first technology involved in this process? Literally physically. Physically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is there a shack with a server in it somewhere? So we actually have, yeah, we have a core data center, the center of nature fresh data, basically where everything ends up. We have our edges, so we have computers right at the edge analyzing stuff. But if you want to go right back to the grassroots of where it actually is, is it's right at not dirt, but a ground up coconut husk. That is what the plants are grown in. And we analyze the data right there because that is our first edge. And people think that's static. For us, the edge isn't static because the edge now moves. We have a plant that grows, then we pick it. And then we have to store it, and then we have to ship it. So our edge actually does move from area to area to area. So statically, one thing isn't the same all the time. So I know it's a hard thing to say how it all starts, but it's just a combination of everything from natural gas to everything. Okay, then are those, because we think of things in terms of like, internet of things and these sensors. Things are being gathered, so you've got stuff happily growing in husks and then being picked. Is that aggregate, what's the next step there? Where is that aggregated? Where does that go? Is that all going straight back to your data center? Or are there sort of intermediate steps in the process? So what we do is we actually store everything at the edge. And we do daily processes right there. And then it aggregates that data and it drops it down from a large number to a smaller number to go to the core. Got it. And then that way at the core, it does the long-term analysis. Because again, a lot of the data that we collect, we don't need to keep. A lot of it is the temperature was X, the temperature, we don't need that. So it aggregates it all down, so that way the information coming to the core doesn't overwhelm it. Because we do store enough information and give you an idea of how our 1.8 million plants are living and breathing. We actually estimated 1.8 million plants throughout our 200 acres. At any moment, that's how many plants they're tracking. And so that real-time information is helping to make sure that they water the plants precisely with the amount that they need, that they're fertilizing them. And I mean, you were telling me about how the life of a plant. You're really maintaining that plant over the life of 12 months. So if you make a mistake at any point along the line, then you're dealing with that in terms of their yield throughout the life of the plant. But you aggregate a lot of that data right there on site so that you're not having to send so much back to the cloud or to the core. And you do that a lot with VxRail as well as other technology you have on site, right? Yeah, our VxRail is the center of the core of how we process things. It allowed us to even expand, not even just for compute, but GPUs for our AIs to do it. So it's what we did and it allowed us to mold how we do things. Alison, question for you. This sounds like a dynamic edge, the way that you described it Keith, you described it so eloquently. How is the partnership that Dell has with NatureFresh, how is Dell enabling and accelerating and advancing its edge solutions based on what you're seeing here in this need for real-time data analytics? We spend a lot of time with customers like Keith and also across all kinds of other industries. And what we see is that they have a really common set of problems. They're all trying to derive real-time data right then and there so that they can make business decisions that impact their profitability and their competitiveness and all of their customers' experience, their product quality. And what we see a lot of times is that they have a common set of concerns around security, how to manage all of the hardware that they're implementing and at the same time they really want to be an enabler for the business outcome. So people have creative ideas and they come to IT hoping for support in that journey. If you're managing everything as a snowflake, it becomes really hard and untenable. So I think one of the things that we have as our mission is to help customers simplify their edge so that they can be that the enabler that's helping the business to transform and modernize. One of the things I really admire about Nature Fresh Farms is that they decided it from a full organization perspective. So everybody from the operational technologists to the IT to the business decision makers and leaders at the company, they all decided to modernize together. And so I think from a partnership perspective too, like that's one of the areas that we try to work with our customers on is really talking about total transformation and modernization. So it sounds like Keith, there was an appetite there as Allison was saying for a digital transformation and IT transformation. Talk to me a little bit about from a historical perspective how old Nature Fresh is and how did you get the team on board? It sounds so eloquent. How did you get the team on board to go, this is what we need to do and technology needs to fuel our business because it's going to impact the end user consumer of our fabulous English cucumbers. So it's actually really neat. Our owner peak wiring, when he first started out, he really wanted to embrace technology. This is going back right to 2000. 2000 is when we first had our first planting and he was actually a builder by nature. He actually was a builder and fabricator and he built greenhouses for other companies but he said they're getting a little bigger and it's the labor amount and the number of growers you needed for a range is getting exponentially higher. So he was one of the first ones that said I'm going to put a computer right in the middle and control this 16 acre range. It's a pretty visionary view when you really think about it. He's trying to operate his farm, right? Operationalize it, it's really cool. Yeah, so it was a neat concept and it was actually very much not a normal concept then. You go back to 2000, people weren't talking about internet of things. They didn't talk about automation, it wasn't there and he basically said this is the way to go and unfortunately he thought I'll sell it to somebody. I'll put a product in for a year and I'll sell it and then guess what happened, he didn't sell it. He says, ah, it's not big enough. I'll build another phase too. And then he said, his comment to me was after he built the fourth phase, he says I guess I'm in the pepper and cucumber business now. And he said, and that's what he's just grown but he said it was a great relationship we had and it's a great concept. And it even goes back and I know we talked about before is the computer allowed one senior grower to control large number of acreages where before you'd need multiple growers that know exactly what to do because they'd have to manually change all these things. Now from a single computer, they can see everything that's going on in the entire range. You mentioned temperature and water and this is kind of out of the blue question but how have global circumstances and increases in the cost of fertilizer affected you or is that fertilizer that's not the type that you use in your operation? Have any insight into that? Yeah, everything has the global change in cost has changed everybody. I don't think there's anybody that's exempt from it. The only thing that we've been able to do is we're able to control it. We don't need to rely on, I guess you can say, rely on the weather to help us do things. We can control how much is and we recycle all of our water. So what the plant doesn't absorb today for nutrients, we'll put it back in the system, sterilize. Wait, when you say 200 acres, it's all enclosed? 200 acres of greenhouse. Yep, 200 acres of greenhouse. I really include, there is not a single portion of our greenhouse that actually gets exposed to the outside. And if you ever see a picture of a greenhouse and you see one of these lovely plants here wet, that's not true, that's just a nice, make it look better. Spray it for the photo. Yeah, spray it for the photo but actually everything is dry. That water goes directly to the roots and we monitor how much we put in and how much comes out and then we recycle it. We even get so much recycling, we run natural gas generators to heat the water to heat the greenhouse. We take the burn off of natural gas, the CO2 and funnel that into the greenhouse to give it natural stimulant. So this is starting to remind me of the Martian. I don't know if you read the book or if you saw the movie. Oh yeah. But you know, planting the potatoes inside the hab in the habitat. And then you cut them in half and the little ones grow with the next ones but yep, we recycle everything that we do. And that's amazing. And all that information at their fingertips, I mean really I think what technology is enabling you all to do is focus on what you all are good at which is focusing on your farming operation and not necessarily the technology. So one of the places I think we deliver some value is invalidating a lot of the solutions so that customers don't have to figure that all out themselves. Yeah, cause I'm not a security expert, I don't always understand the true depth of security but that's where that relationship is. We need this and we need that and we need a secure way to let those communicate and we can hand that off to the experts at Dell and let us do what we do best. What have been some of the changes? In the last couple of years we've seen the security elevate skyrocket to a board level conversation. Ransomware is a when, not if we get attacked. How does Dell help you from a security perspective ensure that what you're able to do ultimately gets these products to market in a secure fashion so that all that data that you're generating isn't exposed? So, like I said, I agree 100% it's not a matter of if it's going to happen, it's when it's going to happen. So one of the things that we've actually done is we started to use the Dell solution, the power protect data manager to back up our solutions on the VxRail and it actually did two fold for us. It allowed us to do a lot of database manipulation from restores and stuff like that but we're now actually even investing in the cyber recovery vault that gives us that protection and it allows us to now look at like how long will it take us to get back up and we're doing some tests right now and the last test we did is we're able to get back up going as a company from a full attack in about an hour. Like we've actually done a few simulations now so we are able to recover what our core needs are within an hour. Which is a very different metric than simply saying, oh the data's available. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You get zero credit for that. We need our operations to be back up and running. Yeah, even that hour is stressful to our growers. It's a variable within a variable because if you go in the summer or in super hot, they'll be like very stressed over an hour and then you got a nice calm weather day, it's not as bad but the weather can change and how they have to close events and you're not just closing one event, you're closing 32, 64, 100-acres events and you're changing the irrigation cycle, you need that automation to do it for you. How do you let people eat these things after all the care that goes into it? I'm going to feel mildly guilty for just about a second and a half before I sink my teeth into the cucumber. Oh, but that's the joy of it. That's one of the things that I love. This is serious, you're proud of this, aren't you? Oh yeah, you know what, there's not a single person at Nature Fresh that isn't proud of what we do each day. We enjoy what we do and it's a culture that makes us strive to do better every day. It's just a great feeling to be there every day and to just enjoy what you're doing. Yeah, see, it's real, this is real. Isn't it great to be a part of, my background's in economics. I think of these things in terms of driving efficiency and this is just a beautiful thing. When you control those variables, you leverage the technology and what's the end result? You're essentially uplifting everything in the world. It's not just philosophical on you. Right, and feeding the world, especially during the last couple of years, that access, one of the things we learned in the pandemic, one of many, is access to real-time data isn't nice to have anymore, it's essential. So true. And so, I mean, the story that you're telling here, the impact of the growers enabling them to focus what you were saying, Allison, on what they do best, Dell Technologies, BX Rail, enabling Nature Fresh to focus on what it does best, ultimately delivering food to people during the last couple of years was huge. Yeah, yeah, and allowing, even at a reduced labor number, for us to keep growing and doing things by automation. You know, we still need labor in the greenhouse to pick, prune, and do stuff like that. But again, we're looking into technologies to help offset that. And, but again, it was one of those things that we just had to be efficient at everything we do. And we drove that through everything we have. Well, and you guys haven't stopped, right? You're continuing to figure out, I mean, he was just telling me a little bit about what their next step is. So, just getting more and more accurate, more and more intelligence as they grow. So, it's the possibilities, that's what's exciting to me about Edge. You know, I think this example is great because it's so relatable. Everybody can understand what the edge is in this context, and it's really driven by the fact that you can put compute into so many different places now. It's more, though, a matter about how do you gather it? How do you do it in a way where you can actually understand and glean information and insights from it? And that, I think, is what you all are really focused on. Yeah, yeah, information is key. It is key. What's next from Dell's perspective for Edge computing technologies? What are some of the things you guys got cooking? Yeah, I mean, we're going to try to help customers to continue to simplify their Edge. So, to deliver those insights that they need, where they need them, to do it in a really secure way. I mean, I know we talked about security, but to do it in really a zero trust fashion and to help customers to do it also in a zero IT fashion because in this example, it's the growers that are out there in the fields or in your greenhouse in a sense. Like helping people that aren't necessarily IT specialists to be able to get all the benefits from the technology. So, do you think that VxRail technology could be used to optimize, say, the production of olive oil? Because I'm looking here and we have the makings of a pretty good salad. Yeah, there you go. It obviously doesn't just apply to food production. Yeah, I mean, it really goes across the board. Whether we're talking about manufacturing or retail or energy, putting technology right there at the point of data creation and being able to figure out how to manage that inflow of data, be able to figure out which portion of the data is really valuable and then driving decisions and being able to understand and intelligently make decisions for your business based on that data is really important. Keith, what's next? Give us, as we wrap up this segment here, what's next from a technology perspective? You mentioned a couple things you're looking into. Yeah, so I think automation is really going to change the way we do things. Automation within the greenhouses is truly just becoming a reality. It's funny we go back and we say, can we do this stuff? And now it's like, oh, even three years ago, I don't think we're quite ready for it. But now it's right there. So I see us doing a lot more work with vendors like Dell and to do automatic picking, automatic scouting, all that stuff that we do by hand to do it in an automated fashion. And at scale, right? That's the important part. I think when you're managing a snowflake, you can only do it to some level and to be able to automate it and to be able to break down those silos, you're going to be able to apply it to so many parts of your business. Now, wide applicability. Guys, thank you so much for joining us, sharing the Nature Fresh Dell story, bringing us actual product. This is so exciting. We congratulate you on how you're leveraging technology in a really innovative way and we look forward to hearing what's next. Maybe we'll see you at Dell Technologies World next year. Sounds great. Thank you so much. All right, our pleasure, guys. Thank you. For our guests, I'm Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 2022. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. So stick around.